Poised to shake up the old order
Women on labor's cutting edge
By Deirdre Griswold
For many decades, all across the United States--indeed, in
much of the world--the ground has been swelling and shifting in
preparation for a social earthquake that cannot be suppressed
much longer.
The vast change taking place is on a very fundamental level.
It has the most profound implications for the future of human
society.
It involves the flood of women who have entered the work
force and become a potent element in the struggle of the
working class.
To appreciate the immense changes, it is useful to look back
at what life was like early in the last century, when Inter na
tional Women's Day was first established.
Sweatshop conditions were so terrible in New York City that
in 1909 a strike of mostly young Jewish and Italian immigrant
garment workers was dubbed "The Uprising of the 20,000." This
struggle prompted the Socialist International, meeting in
Copenhagen the next year, to declare an International Women's
Day.
At that time, however, women who worked outside the home
were a very small minority.
In most of the world, including the rapidly developing
capitalist countries, the vast majority of women worked from
dawn until long after dusk cooking, cleaning, sewing, raising
children, and performing all the laborious tasks of running a
large household without refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, washing
machines or other appliances now standard in industrialized
countries. They labored very hard, but not for pay and not
outside the home.
In the United States in 1900, women made up only 18.3
percent of the official--paid--work force.
Vast majority of women are now wage workers
Fifty years later, that figure had grown to only 29.6
percent. Today, however, women make up 46.6 percent of the
labor force in the United States--nearly half. (These and other
figures cited in this article come from the U.S. Bureau of
Labor Statistics and the Census Bureau.)
That figure shows the breakdown between men and women in the
work force. But looking at just women, how many of them are now
working outside the home?
At least 60 percent of the women in the United States today
work outside the home. An astonishing 99 out of every 100 women
will work for pay at some point in their lives.
Even the majority of women with young children have to go
out and work.
In 2000, among married couples with children, two-thirds of
the women worked--65.8 percent as compared to 57.5 percent in
1980.
With kids to take care of at home, maybe most of these women
worked just part time? Oh no. Women worked full time in 60
percent of dual-worker families in 2000, compared with only 44
percent of such families in 1980.
These statistics don't cover the fact that people today are
living in many relationships other than the "traditional"
family of husband, wife and children. In 1997, for example, 28
percent of the families with children under 18 were maintained
by a single parent--usually the mother. Single parents of
course have a harder time financially and, if they work, in
providing child care, because couples can often coordinate
their work schedules to accommodate the needs of children.
Women in lesbian relationships have a lower family income
not only because women are paid less than men on average, but
because they have the disadvantage in most states of not being
recognized as domestic partners.
Not just the percentage but the absolute number of working
women has also shot up--from 5.3 million in 1900, to 18.4
million in 1950, to 66 million in 2001. The overall population
of the United States is now just 3.6 times what it was in 1900,
but the number of working women has multiplied 12.5 times over
this period.
New reality, old social institutions
These figures represent a huge realignment of forces that is
pressing relentlessly against the outmoded social and political
institutions of this country. The 66 million working women by
and large take much more progressive stands on both
international and domestic issues than do men.
The capitalist market's penetration into every aspect of
life has brought women out of the home to an extent that the
19th-century socialists who campaigned for the liberation of
women could have barely imagined. Women are no longer isolated
from each other or from society at large. They have gained
enormous confidence in areas that had been considered men's
exclusive domain.
But the burden placed on working women has not been lifted
at all. Forget the ads that show relaxed, smiling women
managing stunningly beautiful homes at the push of a button.
Married working women were putting in a 46-hour week on the job
in 1998, and then had to come home and deal with everything
there.
Women are suffering en masse from sleep deprivation. In the
go-go decade of 1989 to 1999, women accounted for 85 percent of
the increase in people working more than one job.
They had to work two jobs, just to keep their heads above
water. While all workers are exploited in the sense that they
produce a surplus that goes into the boss's pocket, women
workers are subject to super-exploitation, above and beyond
that of men.
Have there been gains? Yes, big ones. But they need to be
understood in the context of a period in which the working
class as a whole has been losing ground.
In 1970, when the modern women's movement was beginning to
press for equal pay for comparable work, a popular button read
"59." It referred to the fact that on average, women at that
time earned only 59 cents for every dollar that a man
earned.
The figure today is 76--after many, many struggles, both
individual and collective. And it is even higher among young
women. In the 20-24 age bracket, women are earning 91.5 percent
of men's median wages.
While this is far from equality, it still is an important
advance. It represents a gain of hundreds of thousands of
dollars in wages over an average woman's lifetime. But there
are other sides to this story.
African American women are earning only 67 cents for every
dollar that men in general earn. Among Latinas, it is worse, 55
cents, which is lower than what women overall were getting in
1970.
Furthermore, the decreasing gap between women's and men's
wages does not only reflect a gain by women. It is also caused
by a decline in men's real wages over this same period,
especially as big corporations have eliminated many of the
higher-paying, unionized industrial jobs typically performed by
men.
So while women's wages have im pro ved, and women are
working longer hours than ever, the financial status of the
traditional patriarchal family has declined.
Karl Marx proved in great detail that the laws of capitalism
constantly batter down the workers' share of what they have
created by pitting worker against worker in a competitive job
market. While every company's public relations are meant to
convince you that the bosses consider each worker to be an
individual human being, in fact the time the workers spend on
the job is to the capitalists just another commodity, to be
bought at the lowest price possible.
Marx showed that, unless the workers organize and fight
collectively to improve their position, the compensation they
receive will be pushed down to the lowest level required to
maintain and reproduce them as sources of labor power.
The stagnation and even decline of workers' real wages as a
whole confirms this view. Workers are more productive than
ever. With the newest technology, one worker can do the same
job that it took many to do only a few decades ago. So why are
people working longer and earning less? It is because, without
a vigorous class struggle, the lion's share of what workers
produce increasingly goes to the bosses.
Here is where women workers' role in the labor movement
comes in.
Women are most dynamic section of labor
Women are the most dynamic section of organized labor, along
with immigrants and men of color.
Union membership in general in the United States has been
declining, from 14.9 percent of the work force in 1995 to 13.2
percent in 2002, especially as industrial jobs have
disappeared. In just the last two years, 1.9 million factory
jobs have been lost.
But women are organizing and joining unions as never before.
The biggest union organizing victory since 1937 was won in Los
Angeles four years ago by the Service Employees union, which
organized 74,000 home health-care workers, almost all of them
women of color.
The areas of the economy employing more women--health care,
education, government, food service--are exactly where the
unions have been most vigorous. The Service Employees union is
now the biggest AFL-CIO affiliate, with 1.5 million workers.
Some 40 percent of government workers are organized, compared
to less than 10 percent in private business.
While in 1962 women accounted for only 19 percent of union
membership, by 1997 that figure was up to 42 percent and
rising.
What women have found is that they do much better with a
union. In 2001, women union members earned at least 30 percent
more than nonunion women. The figures are even higher for the
nationally oppres sed: African American union members earn 45
percent more than their nonunion counterparts. For Latino
workers the union advantage totals 54 percent.
And, in a most telling figure, in 1998 women in unions
earned more than unorganized men. This can be the basis for
greater solidarity between men and women as both recognize the
benefits of organization.
Women are now essential to socialized production. They have
enormous problems juggling everything because of capitalist
oppression, but they know they can't go back: Their problems
must be solved collectively. They are now leaders in the
movement for deep social change that pushes ever more
insistently against the entrenched reactionary guardians of the
old order.
Reprinted from the March 13, 2003, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyrighted
under a Creative
Commons License.
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